Treating the sick poor: a quantitative overview

This chapter provides a quantitative overview of the scale and complexion of medical welfare for the period 1750-1834. It focuses on the records of 117 parishes across seven English counties, specially chosen to reflect the socio-economic distribution of English communities at the time. Investigating change over time, variation between different areas and between different community types, the essential finding of the chapter is that there was a concerted upward shift in the scale of medical welfare spending by the mid-1810s.